Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  I got up, found the chair in the living room where I’d flung my suitcoat, and fished my notebook out of the pocket. I dialed a number I’d scribbled into it. The telephone rang three times, then a slow masculine voice came on and told me to leave a message after the beep. I hung up ahead of the beep and got dressed.

  Royal Oak dozed fitfully. Dark houses were a thing of the twentieth century. Those that didn’t leave all their lights blazing like Gatsby’s featured the glimmer of a late-night talk show through picture windows or sent the turquoise beacon of a mercury bulb through the mosquito-ridden reaches of the night. Here and there a garage door yawned open, spilling dropcord yellow where some mid-level executive labored to reset a timing chain or polished the undercarriage of some obsolete two-seater, primping for the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise. You needed a fifty-foot ladder and a telescope just to keep tabs on Ursas Major and Minor.

  The Babbage house was a blaze of light. Every lamp was burning, even the one on the porch. For a home occupied by two senior citizens who had outlived most of the friends they would invite to a party, that was an evil omen. I sprang the Smith & Wesson loose from the trick compartment and stuck it under my belt in back as I approached the front door.

  Once again, Winthrop Babbage answered the bell. Super-added age had gouged cavities in the ham face. Shadows pooled beneath his eyes and engraved new lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, which hung open a little as if the springs that kept it closed had lost tension. The top button of his white shirt had come undone and the skin of his neck hung like bags of shot. His eyes were dull. I saw no recognition there.

  “Amos Walker, Mr. Babbage. We met the other day. Is it too late to talk to your wife?”

  “My wife is in the hospital.”

  That explained the lights. It’s more lonely in the dark. “Is it serious?”

  “They’re setting up a cot for me in her room. I only came home to pack a suitcase with clothes and my prescriptions. It’s not a good time, Mr. Walker.”

  “Which hospital?”

  His mouth worked a little before words came out. “She hasn’t much time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” He started to close the door.

  “I wouldn’t be here at this hour if I didn’t have important questions. Maybe you can answer them.”

  The door stopped. He drew his chin into the folds of his neck. “I don’t owe you answers, Mr. Walker. You’ve gotten far more than enough at this address. In fact, I blame you for Regina’s collapse. Since she spoke to you, the police have been here, because of information you gave them. She was severely upset by both visits. This morning she couldn’t get out of bed. I had to call an ambulance. I’ve been with her all day, and now it appears I’ll be with her until the end.” The door thumped shut.

  The clock in the dash read 12:35, but the traffic was as heavy as at noon. The factory shifts were changing and speed limits were shattering all over town in the race to get home. My eyes smarted from lack of sleep. Oncoming headlights starred out across my corneas and I blinked hard to squeeze moisture into them. The gun was gouging a hole in my back. I unbelted it and laid it on the passenger’s seat. I was beyond exhaustion. But my heart was kicking my ribs sixteen beats to the measure. It was a good thing I was headed to a hospital.

  When it comes to serious care, emergency or long-term, and you live in Royal Oak, there is only one place to go. The local branch of Beaumont Hospital is one complicated cell in a system that has absorbed most of the best-trained doctors, nurses, and technicians in the health community of Southeastern Michigan. One or the other Babbage would fix on Beaumont as if no other facility existed.

  If Winthrop hadn’t exaggerated, Regina’s thirty-four-year reign of hatred for Delwayne Garnet was drawing to a close. When Winthrop joined her—soon, if what I’d seen in his face wasn’t just a reflection of another death nearby—no one would be left to care or even remember how Karl Anthony Mason had blown himself and his colleague to pieces, leaving his mother to fill the vacant space with rage for the one who had survived. What it had to do with the murder of a forgotten fighter nineteen years before that was only a few answers away.

  Maybe. Detecting isn’t an exact science. Nothing is, including science.

  At night the sprawling medical complex burned enough electricity to illuminate Afghanistan. There were lights in all the windows and you could have played a night baseball game under the floods in the vast parking lot. I found a space within twenty miles of the entrance and legged it up the wheelchair ramp. The steps took too long; I was racing the Reaper.

  The nurse on duty at the first station I came to was a pretty, round-faced brunette with a distracting scar slanting two inches across her chin. The degree came with combat training.

  “Regina Babbage’s room number, please.” I spelled both names.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. Visiting hours are over. You’ll have to come back in the morning at eight A.M.”

  “That’s when eight A.M. usually occurs. This can’t wait.” I showed her the county star.

  She pressed her lips into a thin line, paged through a chart attached to a clipboard, and ran a short-nailed finger down the list of names. She paused long enough to make me wonder if I wasn’t at the wrong hospital after all.

  “She’s in ICU. You’ll have to identify yourself over the intercom.”

  I got the number of the intensive care unit, passed through a half-dozen doors equipped with bumper pads and cotton-covered hinges, scaled a long incline, and flattened my thumb against a button under a round speaker mounted next to a door. This time when a voice came on I broke the law instead of just nudging it. I said I was there to see patient Babbage on police business. I was asked to wait one minute.

  One minute later a buzzer razzed and I pushed through the door. The lighting here was soft, as if it were some kind of salon instead of an arsenal of monitors, instrument panels, defibrilators, oxygen tanks, and one-finger latex gloves. The lone party at the station was a young man with a headset clamped over his buzz cut. He murmured an apology into the mouthpiece, looked at the bit of tin in my hand, and asked for my name.

  “Captain Hichens.”

  He asked if that was spelled with an h or a k. I told him and he wrote it down in a log, checking the time against a stainless-steel wristwatch and entering that. “She’s in Three. I can’t let you have more than five minutes.”

  “That’ll be plenty.”

  I hoped it would be. If she was unconscious or didn’t have the answers I needed, it would be a long time in a cell with nothing to occupy me but past failures.

  The room was just big enough for the railed bed, the usual blinking and beeping equipment, a couple of cabinets for clothes and other personal items, and a narrow rollaway bed, made up as tightly as a bunk in a marine barracks. Whatever chairs there may have been for visitors had been removed to accommodate Winthrop Babbage for the night. Regina lay under a thin blanket, taking in and draining fluids through clear flexible tubes hooked up to the standard containers. In the light of a fluorescent panel behind the bed she looked as small as a child. Her pale blonde hair, washed out by the light, was nearly indistinguishable from the white pillowcase. She had a tube in her nostrils. Without the little touch of lipstick and blush her face looked pasty and sunken.

  Time is a fascinating invention. A couple of nights earlier, I wouldn’t have believed any pair of aluminum rails could have held her.

  “Mrs. Babbage?”

  Her eyes were open. After ten seconds they prowled my way. They looked alert.

  I told her who I was. A vertical line appeared between her brows. It wasn’t puzzlement, but annoyance. The brain waves were still strong enough to tip over a bus.

  “Can you talk?”

  She nodded once, a shallow movement. Her lips separated with a sound like pages peeling apart. In a voice like emory paper she asked for water.

&nbs
p; I didn’t know if she should have it, but there was a plastic cup with a straw next to a pitcher on the bedside cabinet. I filled the cup, pressed a button to elevate her top half, and held the cup while she drew greedily on the straw. She let go with her lips and I put the cup back.

  “What name did you use when you sang professionally?”

  She breathed in and out three times, her breath quickening on the third. “Peggy Yale. Yale was my real name, before I married the first time. The booking agent changed the other. He thought people would rhyme it with ‘vagina.’ ”

  Her voice was still hoarse, the sentences drawn out, with spaces to breathe in between.

  “What band did you sing with?”

  “Rex King and his Royal Athletics. It was the house orchestra at the Athletic Club.”

  The room’s air current changed. Someone had opened the door behind me. I bent farther over the bed. “I saw the cufflinks you gave Curtis Smallwood that night.”

  “This man isn’t a sheriff’s deputy. He’s trespassing.”

  I recognized Winthrop Babbage’s voice.

  Regina managed a small smile. Her teeth were all hers. They wouldn’t have let her keep them otherwise. “Pretty snazzy, hey? I had them made at Enggass’s. They didn’t go with his outfit, but I didn’t know what he’d be wearing that night. He took off the ones he had on anyway and put on the new ones. He was a sweet boy.”

  A hand gripped my shoulder. “Sir, you have to leave.”

  It was the male nurse. I shook off his hand. “Who’d you see that night in the parking lot?”

  “Parking lot?”

  I was starting to lose her. Her eyes had gone opaque.

  “You have security, don’t you?” Winthrop’s voice shook. “Call somebody!”

  “The Lucky Tiger,” I said. “The roadhouse. Who killed him?”

  The fog burned off all at once. She nodded again.

  “Fair trade,” she said. “Exodus.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  I was still getting information when the security guard made his appearance, but Regina was growing incoherent, drifting away on the morphine tide. Even her husband’s shouting wouldn’t bring her back to shore. By then the nurse was more interested in calming him down than throwing me out. He’d gotten too intense for intensive care.

  I couldn’t blame him. I’d have screamed at me too.

  The guard was a hard-faced black with a cavernous voice and a tribal tattoo on one wrist. He identified the source of the excitement without direction and asked me to come with him. I came with him. His face looked like a mortar and pestle for pulverizing knuckles.

  Outside the unit he took my upper arm in a delicate thumb-and-forefinger grip that would have crushed an iron pipe. My arm went dead below the elbow. We went down the hall together like old friends.

  “I’ll just ask you to sit in the office till the police come,” he said. “You can’t just bust in. This is a hospital, not some blind pig.”

  We wound around a series of corridors and stopped before an elevator. He pushed the Down button. He was still holding my arm but I couldn’t feel it.

  The doors rolled open and a doctor or something in a lab coat strode out without looking, the way some people will. I decided he was a doctor. The guard relaxed his grip and shifted to make room. I twisted loose, body-checked the doctor into the guard, and took off sprinting. I hit a pair of double doors on the fly. The guard’s shout thundered after me, pinched off when the doors flapped shut.

  I didn’t know the way out from there, but all halls lead somewhere. When after a mile and a half that theory came open to question, I asked for directions from a rubber-faced old gent pushing a vacuum the size of an armored truck along the carpet. He answered softly and I had to ask him to speak up; my own heart and gasping breath drowned out even the bawling of the vacuum. He told me where I’d find an exit. I pounded on.

  I had a hand on a glass door opening to the parking lot when two more guards in uniform came bounding across the sidewalk. They had sidearms and walky-talkies flapping on their belts. I backpedaled into a visitors’ waiting area and stepped behind a kiosk filled with magazines in Plexiglas pockets. The door whooshed open. There was an atoll of silence, then feet thumped the carpet going in two directions. I waited another beat, then stepped out and used the door.

  Outside I took a minute to get my bearings. I’d exited through a separate wing from the one where I’d entered and had to cup my hands around my eyes to isolate the north star from the glare of the floodlights. At length I turned the right corner, found the section where I’d parked, and drove away, obeying the 15 MPH signs in the driveway. As I turned into the street, I heard a distant siren winding up. It probably hadn’t anything to do with me. I only noticed it because I’d broken three laws in close succession, a personal best.

  My building looked medieval at that hour. The street was emptier than usual and the sandstone box with its griffin-headed waterspouts stuck out in the ambient city light like a castle keep. By day it was just an obsolete brown pile. But just then it was the only place for me.

  I was slowing to a stop in front when a square of yellow light breached the wall on the third floor. It was on less than a second, then the glass went dark and resumed reflecting the building across the street. The window belonged to my office. Someone inside had decided to check the time.

  Accelerating gently, I turned the corner and bumped up over the curb and into the little lot I used most days. A sawhorse barricaded the entrance at night. I retrieved my revolver, left the car in a patch of thick shadow, went back on foot, and took up space in the deep doorway of the defunct laundromat across the street from my building. I got out a cigarette, just to be doing something. I didn’t light it.

  The window remained dark. There were no lights in any of the others; the cleaning crew had finished with everything up to eye level and gone home. Everyone had gone home except me and the character who had to know what time it was in the middle of the night. I had a pretty good idea who it was and that he wasn’t alone. That made us three.

  After twenty minutes or so a police cruiser glided down the street heading east, slow as the mail and aiming one of its swivel beams toward the odd shop doorway on either side, casting for prowlers. I backed as far as I could into the shadow. The spotlight on the passenger’s side swung my direction. I ducked and stopped breathing as the beam grazed the crown of my head, paused on the corner entrance of the pet-supply emporium next door, then angled down toward the pavement and went out. The cruiser picked up speed and in the next block turned on its flashers and siren. The whooping dopplered away. Silence drifted back down like volcanic ash and covered the street. Behind it, tires hummed on the hard-hearted surfaces of I-94 and the John Lodge, somewhere on the far edge of the next solar system. The air on that stretch of West Grand hung as quiet as the gardens of Babylon; quieter, maybe. For all I knew, that was where all the happy pagans went to blow out the carbons on Friday night.

  I sucked hard on my cigarette, drawing in as many unignited poisons as I could and kill the more delicate brain cells. I was getting to be too romantic for the work. It was time to hang up the brass knuckles and write odes to glazed pottery.

  More time gnawed at the mountain. I wondered if whoever had broken into my office had broken back out while I was parking the car. I wondered if he’d been there at all. Maybe I had a loose bulb, or the spy microphone had messed up the wiring. Maybe it was my own wiring that was messed up. I hadn’t slept since Nixon.

  The weight of the gun was pulling my spinal column out of line. I adjusted the gun and changed positions, leaning against the other shoulder. Now all I had to worry about was the weight tugging at my eyelids. The sleep that had hung back snickering when I invited it into my bed had come crawling back with the same rotten timing as ever.

  My cigarette made a little tapping noise when it struck the rubber pad at my feet and rolled out onto the sidewalk. It woke me like a gunshot. My eyelids snapped apart. The do
or to my building was opening.

  Reflected city light struck Shelly’s silver thatch of hair first, then the V of Nicky’s pale shirt framed by the open front of the glistening leather Windbreaker he’d put on in place of the suede jacket I’d ruined. They glanced both ways on the street, then started across directly toward me. I reached behind my back and drew the Smith & Wesson.

  They stepped up onto the curb on my side and turned left, away from me. They hadn’t seen me after all.

  Nicky was talking. “Maybe he blew town with the girl.”

  “I don’t think so. She wasn’t with him later.” This was Shelly.

  “That was clumsy. You should of let me drive.”

  “You’re lucky I let you handle a gun.”

  “Christ, I never seen a town this size so fucking dead. You could shoot craps on the center line.”

  The voices were fading. I had to lean out of the doorway to hear them.

  “Where to now?” said Nicky.

  “Back to his dump. Man’s got to go home sometime. He wouldn’t live in a shithole like that if he could go anywhere else.”

  “How long we going to keep this up?”

  “Till we find out where he stashed the girl. Then we do them both.”

  “Dibs on Walker.”

  They were still talking as they moved off, but they’d passed out of listening range. I ran across the street to my building. I didn’t know how close they were parked or if they’d swing past for another look on their way back to my house.

  I had to fumble out my key to let myself in. They’d managed to jimmy the lock without breaking it. The story was the same upstairs. I don’t know why I didn’t just leave everything open. I was the only one who needed a key to get in.

  The waiting room and the office seemed undisturbed. The file cases were locked and they hadn’t taken a knife to the upholstery. They’d probably thought there was nothing worth taking. That made me mad, because they were right. Nicky wouldn’t have been able to resist going through the desk, but I couldn’t confirm that without turning on a light and I wasn’t going to do that. I made a mental note to replace the bottle in the deep drawer. A guy like Nicky would carry around a bottle of rat poison for contingencies like that.